I am super-excited to welcome @ @supercdms.bsky.social to the Fediverse! The Super Cryogenic #DarkMatter Search is a @snolabscience.bsky.social -hosted ultra-sensitive instrument intended to hunt for constituents of dark matter.
#SuperCDMS recently passed a bunch of milestones, including achieving their operational target temperature … just thousandths of a degree above ABSOLUTE ZERO!
Welcome to the #Fediverse! I encourage dark-matter-curious fedizens to follow!
#SuperCDMS uses stacks of hockey-puck-sized silicon and germanium crystals like ultra-cold tuning forks that ring when struck by subatomic particles. Shielding prevents most normal particles from ringing the detectors … leaving them to be struck only by things that can penetrate normal matter without being stopped.
Neutrinos and dark matter are excellent candidates for ringing these detectors!
They have to be ultra-cold because heat is atoms moving, and atoms moving makes noise.
Fundamentally, #SuperCDMS is a bunch of really awesome people trying very hard to solve one of the most difficult questions in the universe: why won’t most of the matter in this universe talk to us atoms?
Being atomic matter is lonely, it turns out. Having great colleagues in a dedicated collaboration makes the loneliness more tolerable. Maybe, together, we can do what no atomic matter on Earth has ever done before: directly engage with the dominant dark matter of this universe.
Curious about #SuperCDMS? I had the pleasure of chatting with “Morning North” host Markus Schwabe about the recent milestones in this cool experiment.
If that link won’t work for you, then check out:
Stephen Sekula